Tag: Paleolithic

Were there any women around in the Palaeolithic Era? If popular culture is any guide you’d think not. And even archaeology itself has a long way to go to address a deeply ingrained bias towards men. It’s obvious that without women Homo sapiens could hardly be here today. But our cultural imaginings of the Palaeolithic…

Will 2016 be the year the world finally lost interest in the paleodiet? Believe it or not, it’s already happened! ‘Peak-paleo’ passed without notice way back in January 2014. We’re often a little behind the global trends down-under, so Australia’s own peak-paleo occurred almost two years after the rest of the planet. This might explain…

Thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans left Africa to embark on a journey that would eventually take them across the globe. Yet we still know precious little about the momentous journeys they undertook. Now, new research by my team and me significantly recasts how we think about the early peopling of Southeast…

Australians have become oddly obsessed with our ancestry. Something in our collective psyche as a nation seems to be turning a healthy curiosity about the past into a deep yearning to belong. What’s fuelling this obsession? Our history as a nation of displaced immigrants? A nation still grappling with its history of dispossession, theft, murder…

We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s a largely impossible dream based on a set of fallacies about our ancestors….